Theoretical uncertainty in baryon oscillations

We discuss the systematic uncertainties in the recovery of dark energy properties from the use of baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler. We demonstrate that while unknown relativistic components in the universe prior to recombination would alter the sound speed, the inferences for dark energy from low-redshift surveys are unchanged so long as the microwave background anisotropies can measure the redshift of matter-radiation equality, which they can do to sufficient accuracy. The mismeasurement of the radiation and matter densities themselves (as opposed to their ratio) would manifest as an incorrect prediction for the Hubble constant at low redshift. In addition, these anomalies do produce subtle but detectable features in the microwave anisotropies.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, 1 figure. Submitted to PR

Demand for programs for key populations in Africa from countries receiving international donor assistance

There has been increasing attention in recent years to the HIV prevention, treatment, and care needs of key populations in Africa, in particular men who have sex with men (MSM), injection drug users (IDU), and female sex workers (FSW). While several major donors have undertaken efforts to prioritize these groups, it remains unclear which African countries are actively seeking donor support for these programs. For this analysis, we reviewed publicly available proposal and budget documentation from the US PEPFAR for fiscal years 2007 through 2010 and Rounds 1 through 10 of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 164 searchable documents retrieved, nearly two-thirds contained at least one program serving FSW (65%, 107 proposals), less than one-third contained at least one program serving MSM (29%, 47 proposals), and a minority proposed programming for IDU (13%, 21 proposals). Demand for these programs was highly concentrated in a subset of countries. Epidemiological data for at least one key population was included in a majority of these proposals (63%, 67 proposals), but in many cases these data were not linked to programs

Tunneling-driven breakdown of the 331 state and the emergent Pfaffian and composite Fermi liquid phases

We examine the possibility of creating the Moore-Read Pfaffian in the lowest Landau level when the multicomponent Halperin 331 state (believed to describe quantum Hall bilayers and wide quantum wells at the filling factor $\nu=1/2$) is destroyed by the increase of tunneling. Using exact diagonalization of the bilayer Hamiltonian with short-range and long-range (Coulomb) interactions in spherical and periodic rectangular geometries, we establish that tunneling is a perturbation that drives the 331 state into a compressible composite Fermi liquid, with the possibility for an intermediate critical state that possesses some properties of the Moore-Read Pfaffian. These results are interpreted in the two-component BCS model for Cauchy pairing with a tunneling constraint. We comment on the conditions to be imposed on a system with fluctuating density in order to achieve the stable Pfaffian phase.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Competition and Selection Among Conventions

In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among conventions at a fine-grained level. In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution. Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues. In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Computational studies explain the importance of two different substituents on the chelating bis(amido) ligand for transfer hydrogenation by bifunctional Cp*Rh(III) catalysts

A computational approach (DFT-B3PW91) is used to address previous experimental studies (Chem. Commun. 2009, 6801) that showed that transfer hydrogenation of a cyclic imine by Et3N·HCO2H in dichloromethane catalyzed by 16-electron bifunctional Cp*Rh III(XNC6H4NX') is faster when XNC 6H4NX' = TsNC6H4NH than when XNC6H4NX' = HNC6H4NH or TsNC 6H4NTs (Cp* = η5-C5Me 5, Ts = toluenesulfonyl). The computational study also considers the role of the formate complex observed experimentally at low temperature. Using a model of the experimental complex in which Cp* is replaced by Cp and Ts by benzenesulfonyl (Bs), the calculations for the systems in gas phase reveal that dehydrogenation of formic acid generates CpRhIIIH(XNC 6H4NX'H) via an outer-sphere mechanism. The 16-electron Rh complex + formic acid are shown to be at equilibrium with the formate complex, but the latter lies outside the pathway for dehydrogenation. The calculations reproduce the experimental observation that the transfer hydrogenation reaction is fastest for the nonsymmetrically substituted complex CpRh III(XNC6H4NX') (X = Bs and X' = H). The effect of the linker between the two N atoms on the pathway is also considered. The Gibbs energy barrier for dehydrogenation of formic acid is calculated to be much lower for CpRhIII(XNCHPhCHPhNX') than for CpRh III(XNC6H4NX') for all combinations of X and X'. The energy barrier for hydrogenation of the imine by the rhodium hydride complex is much higher than the barrier for hydride transfer to the corresponding iminium ion, in agreement with mechanisms proposed for related systems on the basis of experimental data. Interpretation of the results by MO and NBO analyses shows that the most reactive catalyst for dehydrogenation of formic acid contains a localized Rh-NH π-bond that is associated with the shortest Rh-N distance in the corresponding 16-electron complex. The asymmetric complex CpRhIII(BsNC6H4NH) is shown to generate a good bifunctional catalyst for transfer hydrogenation because it combines an electrophilic metal center and a nucleophilic NH group

Flowing with Time: a New Approach to Nonlinear Cosmological Perturbations

Nonlinear effects are crucial in order to compute the cosmological matter power spectrum to the accuracy required by future generation surveys. Here, a new approach is presented, in which the power spectrum, the bispectrum and higher order correlations, are obtained -- at any redshift and for any momentum scale -- by integrating a system of differential equations. The method is similar to the familiar BBGKY hierarchy. Truncating at the level of the trispectrum, the solution of the equations corresponds to the summation of an infinite class of perturbative corrections. Compared to other resummation frameworks, the scheme discussed here is particularly suited to cosmologies other than LambdaCDM, such as those based on modifications of gravity and those containing massive neutrinos. As a first application, we compute the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation feature of the power spectrum, and compare the results with perturbation theory, the halo model, and N-body simulations. The density-velocity and velocity-velocity power spectra are also computed, showing that they are much less contaminated by nonlinearities than the density-density one. The approach can be seen as a particular formulation of the renormalization group, in which time is the flow parameter.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. Matches version published on JCA

New Pulsating DB White Dwarf Stars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We are searching for new He atmosphere white dwarf pulsators (DBVs) based on the newly found white dwarf stars from the spectra obtained by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. DBVs pulsate at hotter temperature ranges than their better known cousins, the H atmosphere white dwarf pulsators (DAVs or ZZ Ceti stars). Since the evolution of white dwarf stars is characterized by cooling, asteroseismological studies of DBVs give us opportunities to study white dwarf structure at a different evolutionary stage than the DAVs. The hottest DBVs are thought to have neutrino luminosities exceeding their photon luminosities (Winget et al. 2004), a quantity measurable through asteroseismology. Therefore, they can also be used to study neutrino physics in the stellar interior. So far we have discovered nine new DBVs, doubling the number of previously known DBVs. Here we report the new pulsators' lightcurves and power spectra.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, ApJ accepte

#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds

Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016